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Amidst the noise of Christmas

Posted by wcrowlandksr on December 1, 2025
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Sitting here listening to old Christmas songs—not just traditional carols, but recordings from many different artists over the years—I’m swept back to my younger days, when life felt much simpler. Some of those artists are gone now, some are still with us, yet their music stirs the same memories. Those were years before everything seemed so complicated, when Christmas did not feel buried under marketing and the frantic rush to buy more, or perhaps I was simply less aware of it then. Either way, compared to today’s relentless advertising, the season seemed quieter and less commercial.

Most people have a certain era that defines the “Christmas music of our day.” That span of time usually lines up with when we are first becoming truly self-aware. It is when songs begin to stick in our minds, when family traditions take root, and when the anticipation and wonder of Christmas really come alive.

For children, the season often centers on presents, toys, and treats. For adults, the focus can shift toward remembering the true reason for Christmas. Some never move beyond the material side of it, and some choose not to—but that is a reflection best saved for another time.

The world is broken, and that brokenness constantly throws distractions in our path, pulling our attention away from what Christmas actually means. This is why the moment in the Charlie Brown Christmas special is so powerful, when Linus says, “Lights, please,” and recites the story so simply and clearly. In just a few lines, he brings the heart of Christmas back into view.

Christmas is, at its core, a time to gather and to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Everything else is background noise. What truly matters is how we respond in the middle of that noise: whether we allow the constant distractions to drown out the message, or choose instead to keep our hearts fixed on what Christmas is really about.

Acquisition of Stuff

Posted by wcrowlandksr on December 22, 2022
Posted in: Freedom, Living Your Best Life. Leave a comment

Not so many years ago, it was commonplace to be subjected to the idea that you needed to buy stuff. If you don’t buy stuff, you aren’t supporting businesses that make stuff for you to buy. If you don’t buy it, the workers have no place to work because they aren’t making stuff. If that happens, they are out of work until they find a new place to make stuff that you might actually want to buy. This concept of needing to buy stuff in order to keep the economy going is failing. People don’t want to have to manage a load of stuff anymore and they certainly don’t want to have to work their lives away to obtain the stuff.

There’s a huge market for paying to put stuff in storage so people do not have to deal with the stuff they have accumulated. It’s easy to differ the decisions of what to do with the stuff that has been acquired by stuffing the stuff into a storage unit and forgetting about it. If it’s dealt with directly, there is the fact that we must deal with the pain of accepting responsibility that we may have wasted energy on the acquisition of some object that now must be disposed of once we realize it’s not truly fitting into our lives they way we were told and believed it would. After all, if it did fit, why would it be in storage?

Another conceptual reason to buy stuff was that if you had “X”, you had essentially done what today’s speak might be “Leveling Up” Back then, it was said that you “Made it”. Owning a Cadillac was at one time a status symbol and having an expensive set of China was also considered the same. Color TV’s were fancy and Hi-Fi systems were also signs that you “Had it Made”. These were luxury items that only a certain class of people could afford. This concept of having the status symbols started before the concept of acquiring things on credit. Once credit came along, it seemed that you couldn’t tell who had real wealth and who had borrowed their way into the appearance of wealth. The difference was that there had to be some way to show you had really “Made It” and people became easy targets for marketing. They were told the needed to buy more on differed payments, low interest rates or easy payments. This would allow the less affluent family to acquire all the stuff that they were told they needed to show they had achieved a position of status that somehow was supposed to provide a sense of comfort.

What it brought was payments and interest rates that would have them indebted to creditors for very long periods of time. It meant people had to go to work to pay for the things they were convinced they needed. They soon learned that the stuff they thought they needed had to be replaced by newer and better stuff because what they had was “old” stuff. This meant you had to buy the latest objects in order to continue to present the image of “Having Made It”. Those low monthly payments just kept coming and the people just kept buying, never fully paying off the last object. Now the people were enslaved to the lenders.

Some became enlightened to the idea that they could acquire all that stuff and not pay for it. This brought the guys who would show up at your door and collect the stuff you didn’t pay for. The lenders sent those guys. After that, the lenders would share notes with each other about your tendency to not pay for the things you purchased with credit. This was and is the way they tell each other if you are at risk of not being able to pay your bills. There’s another entire industry for collecting information about peoples personal habits and locations. It was with this payment history information that lenders would decide how much interest you should pay. After all, it’s not like these borrowers were going to stop buying things. They were convinced they had to have stuff and they were convinced that the acquisition of stuff was to meet a need. This was no longer about buying stuff due to a desire….it’s became a full on need and the interest rates no longer mattered. After all, the payments are “easy”…..aren’t they? Higher interest rates meant it would take longer or higher payments to get rid of the debt for the stuff. But they just kept borrowing.

Enter the next generation. One that saw the fall of the acquisition of things that people were told they needed but later discovered that they didn’t. Some of this next generation was passed some of the stuff from their predecessors for “Safe Passage”. That was to preserve the stuff so it would somehow carry on being of some value. It was too difficult to acknowledge that not passing it on would mean it was not as valuable as once believed. Thus the “Safe Passage” burden. This passing along of heirlooms became a way of handing down stuff so the next generation would be saddled with taking care of stuff that the previous generations were convinced was/is valuable. It became multigenerational stuff.

There’s another issue with not dealing with disposing of stuff once it has reached it’s end of life. Hanging on to what ever stuff you bought because it “was so expensive” is choosing to not accept the fact you spent money and will not be able to recover that “loss”. This is known as Sunk Cost. Keeping this kind of stuff/clutter is “Poor Minded Thinking”. It says you are buying things that you were convinced you needed and once the realization sets in that you don’t, you are unwilling to accept you just may have wasted money on some object and now you will hold onto the object in order to recover your loss. Recovery never happens and you just end up managing it or looking for a place to store it. Either way, it will become a burden when you are willing to continue to allow it to consume your resources (Time, Money, Space, Personal Energy) because you don’t want to let it go and accept the loss in the form of Sunk Cost.

There’s a new promoted movement that is happening where the younger generation has rejected the idea of collecting physical stuff. Instead, they consume. Newest phones, latest technology and most relevant social platform(s) are a sampling of what’s being sold now. The idea is the same, sell stuff to the people. The difference is that it’s now virtual. It doesn’t pile up and just expires and eventually “goes away on its own”. It’s still accomplishing the same thing. Extracting money from the consumer and replace it with stuff.

Embrace the freedom from collecting stuff and let the stuff you are no longer using go. “Making It” is a lie and it’s never been defined. That’s how you can be tricked into trying to achieve an undefined state.

The world has changed

Posted by wcrowlandksr on December 21, 2022
Posted in: General Ramblings. Leave a comment

The “Cop Call”

Today I got a call from some random “agency” that was said to represent the police something or other organization. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for laws that make sense and the enforcement of those laws. I’m not interested in randomly handing money to some police charity because the system they represent sold them up a creek years ago. The caller tried to use what I call the “Intimidating Authoritative Cop Voice” when speaking to me about this organization he had called me for. I quickly got the impression that the effort was to sound scary and I needed to pay not only attention, but to actually give money. That’s a hard pass for me as I really do not subscribe to being coerced into anything and especially don’t appreciate it being done by an agency that has a level of built-in authority already. The key here is that they somehow forget that being a police officer is a servants’ role and it’s not for them to “be in power” although many seem to lean that way once they are badged. It’s a shame really.

The changes in viewpoints these days, come in the form of how we as a society react to these intimidation tactics. I simply hung up on the guy mid sentence because I wasn’t going to hand over a single red cent and know that most of these charities keep way more of the money they bring in than they give to the very persons they claim to represent.

“The Sales Call”

As I was writing, I got a call from a local motorcycle dealership, Harley Davidson to be specific. I was already in a bit of a spicy mood so I let that be my guide as I chatted with the caller. He didn’t identify himself when I answered…strike one. Asked for me by name as if he was hunting me. Strike two. He really called to tell me about some promotions his dealership was offering. I let him proceed and it was clear that there had been no homework done or effort made to be prepared when he called me. He stumbled to get out that they were selling motorcycles with a deferred payment plan until….next month. Strike three.

Rather than behave in the manner that most might have, I asked if there were any other promotions going on and when he said “No”. I nicely said, “Your marketing department isn’t really doing their job, are they?” The defeated response was kind of hard to hear but his answer was that it was really his fault and he was new and unprepared. I offered him some freed advice and to take a look at my file in the system and discover that I had just bought a brand new Motorcycle this same year and had another I bought the year before. I proceeded to tell him that I really like these bikes but the idea of buying yet another made no sense and to call me with such an offer was not very good marketing. I also told him that if he had called me with that info and told me they were having a killer sale on a stage IV upgrade, that would have had my interest. He knew nothing of such a deal and didn’t even offer to go check and call me back if it was an option.

The take aways of the two calls.

“Cop Call” was a lazy effort in attempting to collect money using an old method of powerful voice and police backing to get a donation to a charity. Today’s educated society doesn’t fall for this trick easily and it’s usually more successful on the less aware.

“Sales Call” was a lazy attempt to offer indebtedness and a motorcycle to an already proven customer who clearly had some level of interaction with the dealership. It was, “I’ll give you a motorcycle if you will spend the next 6 years making payments on it”. What they didn’t do was learn why I was interacting with them in the first place. In my case, I had already purchased a motorcycle and had it serviced with them.

What are we learning?

There are bots and artificial learning algorithms designed to scour databases and mountains of information. You can buy a Health tracking watch and it will know when your pulse quickens. It also knows where you are so if you were, for example, in a dealership looking at an exciting product, that fancy watch just might be able to send a message that your pulse seems to quicken when you are looking at that desirable object. It also could be made to know if you were excited about closing on a deal for similar reasons. That info could be used to signal to the sales team that they are close on striking a deal. This is the level of detail about people that can be collected and then used as a way to turn the marketing machine onto the would be customer.

Because of this high level of information that can be collected, it makes no sense for any organization to be so poorly prepared or to use such old and outdated tactics to appeal to donor/customers. It’s hard enough with people having far less disposable income than they did not so long ago.

There’s a transference of power to those who figure out how to use the new datamining tools and those who choose to remain lazy and continue to do things the old school way. Old school isn’t going to work forever and one day it will leave you on the side of the road asking yourself, “What happened?”.

Changes aren’t new and it’s been going on for a very long time. The rate that it’s happening has in fact increased and it makes it difficult to stay on top of your game. It’s easy to try to just continue to do things they way they’ve always been done but you will eventually have to adapt.

Do We Stop Growing?

Posted by wcrowlandksr on July 27, 2022
Posted in: Perspectives, Uncategorized. Leave a comment

One day, out of the blue, I was searching Facebook Market Place and then Craigslist and it happened. I got bored with it. I have been buying and selling things for many years on these platforms with great success. I had sold and collected lots of useful and some not so useful objects over the years but somehow I was not finding anything useful or worth pursuing. There’s tons of varied things for consumption but it just had no appeal. Was I having an epiphany? Is there something out of alignment in my life or was I just experiencing that outgrowing of a given activities thing? Was I just tired of managing objects that I had outgrown and didn’t want to continue to bring more of the same into my world?

A few weeks ago, I had stumbled onto the concept that we can outgrow things in our lives and at some point if we recognize it and choose to deal with it, we can move onto the next level. It’s not some next level of Zen-Like experience but a general next level of progression through the stages of living.

1 Corinthians 13:11 – When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

The question for me is do we have to stop maturing as we age? Clearly, there are many people who do not mature as they age and it would seem they have no interest in doing so. There are others who do want to better themselves. They continually they evaluate, reshape and adjust. They put away the things of old and seek out ways to live better lives through learning and taking action.

I think the boredom with poking through the Market and Craigslist comes from finding similar things to what I have already collected and in some cases let go of. I do find myself looking for a few specific things that are new but the idea of browsing for random things isn’t as appealing as it once was. Now to continue the purge.

OutGrowing or Just Change?

Posted by wcrowlandksr on July 26, 2022
Posted in: Perspectives, Uncategorized. Leave a comment

Years ago I wrote about something I called square goldfish. It is located here.

In that note, I wrote about outgrowing your environment and what it means to recognize it’s happened.

Fast forward ten years and I have stumbled upon a concept that better puts those thoughts into a more useful context. The concept is that we all tend to outgrow some things in our lives. I think that all through our lives, we tend to have activities that we do for a while and then sometimes we stop of find new ones. We pick up objects that have some intrinsic value to us and then that value may begin to decline over time because they have outgrown the object. Eventually we may find the object has no value to us anymore but because it once did, we hang on to it. Some people seem to have a natural ability to toss aside that which they have outgrown but others do not. For those who don’t have the natural ability to let go, things can get pretty cluttered around them. This same concept also seems to apply with more than just objects. It can be failed relationships, jobs/careers and even the places we live.

I believe there are many factors that may cause a person to hang on to something longer than truly needed. It can be a sense of never being able to replace something once it’s gone, even if it’s no longer used and has been outgrown. The “what if” one day, it might be needed again lingers in the mind. A great example are old computers. If you have a old PC that you built or just bought and it was at one time considered a high performance machine and now the standard has far surpassed the one you built, would you keep it “just in case”? Why? It’s clear that it’s no longer able to perform the current day operations that have made it obsolete. Does it have content on it? Can you retrieve it? If so, why have you not? This example is easy to see but what about other examples that may not be?

Are you engaging in hobbies or activities that you are just going through the motions so you will not have to admit that maybe you have outgrown them? Are you using an object once in a while so you can justify keeping it around even if you don’t really need or want to use it? Is that just going through the motions so you do not have to acknowledge it’s time to make a decision on what you might need to do with the object? After all, it’s been said that clutter is deferred decisions. In other words, not deciding what do do with something and letting it take up space in your life when it has no true value to you becomes clutter you must deal with.

Take some time to look around and see what you may have laying around in your world and see if you can identify some objects and start with them. Ask yourself, does this object bring me joy? Does it have value? Is it useful? Are you actually using it? If not, you may have outgrown it and you need to decide how to let it go. If you choose to keep it, you are contributing to a pile of objects that you must manage and that is nothing more than a time suck.

Wouldn’t you rather be doing something you enjoy rather than having to burn time to manage instead of having to manage things that just occupy your time and have no value to you?

Living Your Best Life

Posted by wcrowlandksr on September 15, 2021
Posted in: Living Your Best Life. Leave a comment

The Release Of Objects Accumulated In Life

In order to live our best life, at least one area we need to develop is the mindset of examining what we currently have in our life and how those things fit into our goals.  We did this with our chicken flock.  We learned that it was not going to be in our best interest.

We did the chicken farm thing, and it was successful.  We had so many eggs that we couldn’t keep up with the production.  Over time, we were overrun with eggs.  With the birds doing well with “Free Ranging” we did begin to run into troubles when the birds attracted predators that began to kill our flock.  In doing what’s best, we decided to reassess our operation.  It was at that point we decided that to re-home our diminishing flock.  This wasn’t about quitting but realigning our priorities to “live our best life”.

See, having chickens was not a bad choice nor was letting them go.  We realized that we could in fact raise them and have more than enough eggs.  What we didn’t fully consider was the care taking required would mean we had to figure out ways to ensure the birds were taken care of daily. 

The care requirements meant we couldn’t travel very far or long.  At the time of the Covid crisis, it wasn’t much of an issue.  We eventually learned that while there was a certain satisfaction in being able to raise your own food source, it comes at a higher cost than appeared on the surface. 

Since we wanted to travel or just be able to take a real vacation here and there, we had to assess what we were doing to make that happen.  We also had to assess what was preventing it.  Since we didn’t want to do the full-on farming thing where we raise our own crops and animals, we decided that relying on the market and economy for our food sources is in our best interests.  This frees us up to travel and take those longer trips away from home.  It reduces the table space we lost to the mountains of eggs we couldn’t consume and the stresses of what to do with them as they went bad.  Yes, that happened, and the frustrating part is that we couldn’t even give them away fast enough….and we tried.

Back to the “Living our best life thoughts”.  We are still working out what this means and it’s not something that happens overnight.  What we do know is that being tied down to our home with a reduced ability to explore is not for us.  We also know that we need to have a place to call home and retreat to.  This should be a place where we can come to without having to feel like as soon as we arrive, we need to do a mountain of work to “get the place back in order”.  Worst case, it’s a little bit of lawn mowing and simple things a normal home needs. 

Inside and outside of our home, we want clean spaces that aren’t cluttered and don’t have things in them that do not have a purpose.  A picture on the wall for example has a purpose of decorating the wall but that same picture on the floor that hasn’t been hung up and we continue to have to step over it or move is clutter and should be hung or stored.  On storing, it’s important to determine if what we store is truly important to us.  We cannot store should not be stored in order to decide what to do with it later.  Doing that is to defer decisions and it is how a home becomes cluttered.  Piles of deferred decisions can build up rather quickly.  It’s also important to not just throw out everything because we don’t want to have to face having to decide.

How to tackle the deferred decisions.  It’s challenging to just walk into a room or space and just start sorting what needs to go where.  Researching ways to make this easier have yielded many ideas and the following is one that seems to have merit.  I’m sure there are others. 

Using Categories to sort. – By looking at our lives, we can categorize the things we find important as well as those things that are just required daily living things.  Once we figure out what categories are important, we can then begin to move throughout our environment and begin to sort and store, release or dispose of. 

When looking at any object from any category, we can assess it and ask a few questions to determine how we direct it.  1.  Does the object bring us joy? 2.  Does still it have a purpose in our life.  3.  Does the object have value.  Once it has passed the questioning it can then be determined what/where to place it.  Sometimes it’s going to be stored.  For example, a box of family photos that brings us joy when we look at them.  A wine rack full of delightful wines, could get a yes to all three questions.  A giant meat slicer in the kitchen might get a “yes” to the question of value but a “no” to the others.  Sorting an object such as giant meat slicer is relatively easy.  Its giant size did anything but bring joy as it was incredibly large.  Its purpose had been reduced due to the sheer size of the unit.  It was not useful enough to use and then have to clean it each time.  It’s more practical to just purchase our meats pre-sliced.  This answers the purpose question with a “no”.  It does have value, so the answer was to release the object by selling it.  Which we did. 

Some thoughts about the release of an object.  Sometimes there will be a point where all three questions are answered with a “no” and it is at that point we have to recognize something called “Sunken Cost”.  This is where the object has been deemed as having served a purpose but no longer does, it also does not bring joy and has no value.  An object with this sorting applied to it can be difficult to release because it can be hard to let go of something that we have spent money for, and we do not see a way to recover the “sunken cost”.  We must recognize that hanging onto such an object is not good for us as these items only serve to weigh us down because if we decide to keep them, we are then forced to manage these objects that have no reason to be in our lives.

How do we let go?  There are several thoughts on how that can be done.  One such way is intriguing and seems to make some sense.  A little strange but effective.  When you get to the point you have determined that the object must be released, you can release the object after you “thank” it for being useful and realizing its purpose in your life has been fulfilled.  You then release it by giving it away or disposing of it.  I did say it was a bit strange.  Rather than “thanking” the object, you could simply look at it and acknowledge it has reached “the end” of its time in your life.

I have been letting go of such things as of late and I can say for sure that after a while, you realize it’s quite freeing.  This reduction of objects that do not get at least one answer of yes for the three questions will help us live our best lives.  We are reducing the task of managing them when they only serve to consume our lives, our space and our resources when we let them go.

Are you on the path to living your best life?

SEMPER FI

Posted by wcrowlandksr on August 23, 2019
Posted in: Marine Life. Leave a comment

Semper Fidelis – Latin for Always Faithful.

The motto of the Marine Corps and the name of a most recent acquisition. A boat. Rather, a boat that’s been named before I knew of its existence. That being said, it’s generally bad luck to rename a vessel without a proper ceremony and there’s much superstition that many have ignored only to their peril. My first one had a name that I didn’t care for so I simply removed it without being aware of the potential “dangers”. I didn’t know that this was not good idea but it had many problems following that event. Was it conicidence or something more..?

A view the stern of SEMPER FI

So where does that leave me now? Should I risk the renaming the new boat (with proper ceremony) or keep the name. I like it and it’s deep meaning so I think I will keep it. It serves double duty with both its meaning and the invocation of a certain esprit de corps. While it’s not my particular branch of service, there is a strong connection between mine (The Coast Guard) and the Marines. If you read the story of Douglas Munro you will understand the where this connection comes from. He gave his life to cover the withdrawl of the 7th Marine Regiment during the battle at Guadalcanal in 1942. One of the men saved as a result of Douglas Munro’s selfless act was none other than Lt. Col. Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller.

“Lt. Gen. Lewis “Chesty” Puller was a Marine’s Marine. A bonafide badass leatherneck with the scars to prove it. But this badass had one soft spot—his fierce loyalty and care for his men. Puller’s leadership is one of the reasons why to this day, Marine Corps officers in the field never eat until the enlisted men have been served.”

So why leave the name on my new boat that might look like a text book case of stolen valor or odd coincedence? I can assure you it’s not. This is about a boat with a strong name that connects on a level of heroism and loyalty.

Out of the water for inspection

Fair Winds Knot Again

Posted by wcrowlandksr on July 29, 2019
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a comment

July, 2019

I’ve been away for a while. Been very busy with life. I’ll comeback more and write later but let’s just say I’m attempting to sell my current boat and I’ve found another one. This is about that subject…The Boat

Sometime in late Aug 2019,

This was the boat I had when I met my lovely bride. I promised her a trip to Blake Island and this photo is from that trip.

Many things have happened over the last weeks but it’s safe to say that the boat I thought I had found as the right one just wasn’t. The combination of an impatient seller and slow postal services among a few other events, pushed what I thought was my dream boat out to sea. It’s really too bad as it was built by one of my favorite designers and was also unique and rare. But that’s the way things go sometimes and when you look back, you can see that the situation you end up landing in often turns out far better than you could have anticipated or planned.

Cut to current day boat selling results.
A few days ago, I delivered my last boat to its new owners…or rather, I delivered the new owners to the boat. They arrived in town via ferry and sailed to the new homeport with thier prized posession. Fair winds and following seas Knot-Again.

Leaving its home port where I operated her from for over half a decade. Her name is “Knot-Again” and I will miss the siren song of the v-8 twins along with the maneuverability that only they could offer.

My work while she was in my charge was to give her the mechanical care and updates needed to enjoy the time while we were together and to be ready for next phase the she will be going through now. The next owner has plans to restore her to a shiny new glory and to share at least the pictured results with me. I can’t wait to see how that turns out!

Winning the battle or winning the war?

Posted by wcrowlandksr on January 23, 2019
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a comment

Our parents used to tell us not to talk to strangers and don’t get into cars with strangers.
Now we have an application that let’s us talk to strangers and get in their car with them.

Today, I took a Lyft Ride from hell…or so it seemed.
I wasn’t feeling great and it was raining.. You know, that soaking tiny misty gets all your clothes wet all the way to your soul rain? Yeah, that kind. I opted to skip the shared bicycle program and hop in a car with some strangers. What could go wrong? I’ve done this many times before and had no issues. But…there’s always that one time…and that for me was today.

It started with a shared ride where another rider had the same name as me. This confused the driver. She also had a vehicle rated for 5 passengers and already had three of us in it. This meant that any extras would have to climb over the backseat to get into a space that only a child might fit. Essentially, that wasn’t gonna happen as we queue a man with a name that I will simply call “Tiny”. Tiny was twice my size, nice as could be as most big guys usually are. He was our fourth passenger on the route for this shared ride to Hades.

Earlier when I hopped into the ride, I tried to get my seat belt to lock but it didn’t want to engage. That should have been my first red flag, along with sitting for 2 minutes while normal traffic cruised by and the driver was too scared to pull out into the lane. A failing seat belt should have been a “no go” but I persevered. I thought once again, what could go wrong? “Tiny” was what could go wrong even though it wasn’t his fault. The other passenger that shared my name decided he wanted no part of riding with Tiny and decided to bail out as he walked up to the vehicle. The driver was confused about what had just happened and didn’t know what to do. This was because the application for Lyft doesn’t allow the driver to boot the passenger off the list very easily or she simply didn’t know how to do it. Even if she had with the way things were going, she probably would have booted me instead and I probably would have ended up at bailout dude’s destination.

A few minutes into this downward spiral of a ride, bailout dude calls the driver and says he needs the driver to mark him as dropped off in the app. Presumably, he wanted to get another ride where Tiny didn’t exist. Now the driver is trying to operate the app and drive in the rain and not boot me out of the app instead of bailout dude. Meanwhile, Tiny and I are exchanging a few chuckles about how he would have cancelled the ride if he had to climb into the “Jump-seat” in the back. Mind you, there’s no doors back there…so there’s that.

Now the driver is getting a little flushed and keeps saying she didn’t know why bailout guy hopped out without saying why. I think she’s feeling a little concerned about her rating at this point and she still can’t boot the guy off the ride in the app…but she gives it the old college try while we are moving, albeit very slow…or maybe it wasn’t a “college” try. Just a try? Who knows? Now I’m starting to regret hopping in the ride with strangers and I’m thinking bailout guy had the right idea…Man I miss that guy now…

Now the driver is confused and complaining as to why the app tried to schedule a full load and I’m becoming a bit annoyed at this point because I really just want to get to work but I held my tongue. I did say that she probably had that happen because she insisted that her Toyota RAV4 was able to carry 6 people. That’s her plus 5. Ummm, that would be a no. Besides have you seen Tiny back here?

As we finally rounded the corner to my office, we struck…and I mean struck the curb on the corner. Remember that seat belt thing that wasn’t working? No we come full circle and the belt isn’t working, me and Tiny are taxing the suspension and the curb wants to help. I bashed my head onto the roof as a goodbye gift but this wasn’t all of it.

I hopped out at my stop not 150 feet away. Dragged my backpack out and Tiny handed me my umbrella that had somehow fallen out of my pack. Looking back at this point, I would not have been surprised if the door would have been taken off due to passing traffic, but that didn’t happen.
Tiny asks me if I’m OK after bashing my noggin on the edge of the window and I think I am good so I say, I’m OK, I just want this ride to be over. He quietly says, “Yeah, me too” Or at least I think that’s what he said.

Now I’m at the door and Mr. Doorman opens the Door and walking in and doing a recursive check to verify I didn’t leave anything behind. Welp! No wallet! Crap! I’m pretty sure it was knocked out of my coat pocket during our attempt to jump the curb, Dukes of Hazzard Style.

As any normal person would do, I panicked. I’m missing a wallet and standard accouterments that enable travel and personal identification along with a few bucks cash. I’m also concerned about the link it has to my finances. Hoping for a quick resolve, I looked for a contact number to the Lyft company and as it turns out, they have very craftily disappeared without so much as a method to speak to a real person who might have the ability to assist. Instead, there is a stale number on the web that directs you to a web page that I never have received a call back from when I filled out the info. They did however tell how to contact the driver to see if they found my missing object(s). You have to search your ride history to get a contact number for the driver.

Here’s the fun part. You can’t search your ride history if you haven’t completed the transaction for the ride. In my case the app wanted to know how my ride from hell went and I had a choice. Lie, tip, and give 5 stars and say how nice the ride was…ORRRR. tell the truth and maybe never see my wallet again. You can imagine my decision.

Now I’m looking through the app after completing the transaction and I find the “contact driver because you left some crap in thier car” link. In order to use it, they will charge you an additional 15 bucks to get your stuff back if they deliver it to you. (It goes to the driver). So I agree with no other choice and call the driver….BINGO! They have my wallet!

I eventually got my wallet back unscathed and the cash was in there. I tipped her 20 and she says thank you and I should complete the lost item think in the app so she can get the additional 15 bucks. Are you kidding me? I think I will though because the app may not work if I don’t even though I just handed her 20 cash…BTW: the website suggests you tip in cash so not only do they hit you for using the technology to contact the driver but they charge you to connect with them.

So, I’m into a ride for $4.50 plus a $5.00 online tip to help ensure that sure my wallet doesn’t disappear, a $15.00 charge for a delivery fee and $20.00 as a thanks for not cleaning my wallet out at a grand total of $44.50 and an excess cost of 40 bucks. None of this would have happened if the seat belt worked and the driver had not tried to jump the curb. It’s not like I was being careless in keeping my stuff on my person but I still had to pay.

Winning the battle or winning the war?
If I had blasted the driver for the bad driving, her apologetic complaining, misrepresenting how many people here vehicle could carry and general bad experience they delivered, I might have won the battle regarding crap service but I would have lost the war in getting my wallet back as they had the upper hand.

Yes the Lyft connection interface sucks as does their customer service but with my wallet hanging in the balance, I had no choice but to play the game their way. I will however very carefully reconsider doing business with them if I don’t hear back soon.

Until then, I have realized that you really are getting into a car with strangers and the company they work for doesn’t want to talk to you.

Enough

Posted by wcrowlandksr on December 6, 2018
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a comment

I’ve been on this planet long enough to learn a few things.  IveI learned that the definition used to determine if something is alive is to see if it responds to stimuli.  That is to look for responses from a subject when it receives an interaction.

For example, interactivley poke a bear with a stick, the bear turns out to be alive, you get mauled or eaten by said bear.   Proof of Life…and potentially, your death.

Notice in this example, the bear didn’t run to a safe space or get offended, start trash talking the stick wielding annoyance or call other bears to help.  It just took care of business.  Destroy the source of irritation.

What if the bear had responded differently and just politely ignored the source of poking with the stick?  I think the occurance would go on over time and the testing would have continued.  To the eventual response that stops the poking event.  Destroy the source of  negative stimuli.

In life we get two basic types of stimuli.  Negative or positive.  How we respond is dependent on the type of  stimuli we receive.

What about the individual doing the poking at the bear with the stick?  At first, the bear simply moved and the reward to the poker was that the bear moved.  Eventually the response became negative and the poker quickly learned NOT to go poking at bears with sticks.

There are far too many people out there whine about being offended and using their feelings as a source of manipulation of those around them.  They don’t want to be or learn about what has been considered for a very long time as polite social interaction.  They have not been taught how to be polite and that’s the fault of the previous generation.  The previous generations were affraid of hurting the feelings of the now seruously socially uneducated masses.

It’s time to educate them before it’s too late.  I think that given enough negative stimuli for bad behavior backed with mild direction on what works is the last available option.

Case and point.

The wife and I needed a seat on the fast ferry. The one woman blocking the isle refused to get out of her seat and let us in. Instead she just turned sideways but really didn’t make any space for us to get by.
I clearly made two more polite verbal requests for her to actually stand up so we could get in.
She ignored me. I’m a bigger guy and used to have more patience with people. Now I’ve become less tolerant of rude behavior.

I have decided that people like that continue to act the way they do because they “get away” with it. Kind of like getting rewards for being rude.

We patient people have been too often too concerned about offending those around us who act this way.
I’ve lost that concern.

Back to the lazy rude seat hog.
She wouldn’t move so she received two negative stimuli, a backpack across the head and a face full of ass…my backpack and my ass. Much less of a reward for bad behavior and more of a punishment… I didn’t care and once I sat down. I said maybe next time you should get up.

It should be noted, I offered direction on what would be considered polite…more than once.  When the incorrect response was given, I delivered a negative stimuli followed by another explanation of why the negative response.

Without order, rules and courtesy, comes chaos.  It’s time to restore order and courtesy by whatever means required.  STOP POKING THE BEARS WITH STICKS OF RUDENESS!